Steam Experiences Another Year of Sales Growth in 2011

Sales doubled year-over-year once again on Valve's PC game distribution service.

Although it feels as though the market for digital PC games distribution is becoming more and more competitive, that hasn't stopped Steam from continuing to grow.

The Valve-operated distribution service saw sales increase by over 100 percent in 2011 as compared with 2010. Remarkably, that's seven years in a row it has managed that feat, though it wasn't the only milestone Valve had to brag about. During the Steam Holiday Sale at the end of the year, Steam surpassed 5 million simultaneous players.

Other numbers of note from today's announcement include the amount of data delivered through Steam in 2011: 780 petabytes (a petabyte being 1000 terabytes). That's double the amount of data transferred by Steam in 2010, which is likely why Valve opted to upgrade its content delivery over the summer.

Reminding us that Steam introduced support for free-to-play games (includingTeam Fortress 2) over the summer, Valve president Gabe Newell stated the Big Picture UI mode announced early in 2011 is being prepared for launch. With it, Steam users will more easily be able to use the program on larger screens.

Steam is now faced with increased competition from EA's Origin, the relaunched version of the EA Store. Certain EA games, including Crysis 2, were pulled from Steam in 2011, while other big-name games like Battlefield 3 were never made available. (The digital version of EA's big MMO launch for the year, Star Wars: The Old Republic, was also unavailable on Steam, but that was an exclusive for Origin, whereas the aforementioned EA games can still be had through GamersGate, Direct2Drive, and others.) Competition from Origin will likely increase in 2012 as it was only this past November that it added third-party content.

My objection to Origin...

... is that EA has burned me one too many times. They've gone back on promises, forced you to use poorly designed webservices to get paid-for content, used invasive DRM, cut support for good studios, shown themselves to be completely incompitent, and treated customers like a bunch of ***holes. The things they did to the C&C franchise and its fans are legendary. Meanwhile Valve has shown itselt to be competant, fun loving, sensible about its DRM, completely reasonable about its prices, and willing to provide a whole lot of important features for free.